Yes, I Actually Am a Professional Anticareerist. Ha Ha, Only Serious.

Polywork is inspiring me to tell the story of my work on my own terms, instead of trying to shoehorn myself into job titles, a resume, or a career trajectory.

In the process, I’m revisiting the idea that Professional Anticareerist may in fact be the best job title for me. For real.

Not just because The Anticareerist (well, actually its predecessor, whywork.org) was the first project I founded and launched on the web, or because this project and its predecessors have occupied 20+ years of my life.

Not just because I’ve got a resume with questionable “gaps” and a thoroughly interdisciplinary academic past (psychology, philosophy, and accounting.)

Not just because I’ve got a big collection of anticareerist quotes that I made into memes.

It’s the best title because I’ve harbored resistance to careerism as far back as I can remember. Even in my college-prep high school I remember thinking: But what if I don’t want to go to college? What if I don’t want to get a job? What if I just want to stay home and read, think about stuff, and write? Why do people call me a dilettante or a flake for that?

That is, in fact, what I’ve wanted my entire life: to spend most of my days reading, thinking, and writing. I “published” my first “book” at the age of nine. It was about a horse. I taped the pages inside a manila folder with contact paper on the cover. Decades later, I still have it.

I now earn the bulk of my income through writing and editing. But not through the kind of writing and editing that lives inside me. Not through the writing that presses on my awareness and steadfastly demands to be translated onto the page when I wake up in the morning. That writing has never earned me more than a pittance.

Copy editing is the best “day job” I’ve ever had, by orders of magnitude. In that sense, I’m living the dream. I respect and appreciate my clients, too, which makes all the difference in the world.

But that split between what I do to “earn a living” and what I’m driven to write out of intrinsic motivation is something I’ve struggled with all my life, and The Anticareerist is the project through which I explored that tension.

Maybe it’s time to revive the Twitter account for The Anticareerist, if not the blog. If I’m feeling inspired to document the project’s history for Polywork anyway, perhaps I could share some of it there, too.

I had a website for The Anticareerist as recently as 2019, and I also started a Patreon and a Substack newsletter for it in the early days of those platforms. I deleted them all. Most of the material I published can be found through a search at the Internet Archive, and some of the links on the Twitter account still work, but otherwise the project has not kept up a current public presence for the past two years.

Why not? Burnout.

Honestly, the project was a money pit, and it’s damn hard to be a self-employed freelance writer in the U.S. I figured 20 years of failing to make it financially viable was quite enough, thank you very much. I earned that Failed In Public badge many times over.

I really am a Professional Anticareerist. With over 20 years of verifiable work experience, including moderation of a popular email list I launched in 2000.

I’ll refrain from commenting at length about the irony of being chronically overworked and underpaid by a project championing leisure and unconditional basic income.

I don’t know what kind of SEO magic they’ve got going on here at Polywork, but it’s impressive. People are finding me and following me quickly, even though I’ve only been here a few days. That’s helpful for someone whose publicity skills are underwhelming at best.

My chronic failures in the publicity department were pointed out to me on crypto Twitter recently when an influencer with 70K followers shared one of my posts. One of their followers, after checking my new crypto Twitter profile, commented: “A creator with 8 followers? Something’s off here…” (I now have 23. Baby steps!)

Whatever else may happen on Polywork, I’m grateful for their decision to hide follower counts from the public.